We the Jury

Winner of the 2022 Colorado Book Award for Poetry A boy asks his father what it means to die; a poet wonders whether we can truly know anothers thoughts; a man tries to understand how extreme violence and grace can occupy the same space. These are the questions Wayne Miller tackles in We the Jury: the hard ones, the impossible ones. From an academic dinner party disturbing in its crassness and disaffection to a family struggling to communicate gently the permanence of death, Miller situates his poems in dilemma. He faces moments of profound discomfort, grief, and even joy with a philosophers curiosity, a fathers compassion, and an overarching inquiry at the crossroads of ethics and art: what is the poets role in making sense of human behavior? A bomb craterturnedlake exploding with lilies, a home lost during the late-aughts housing crashthese images and others, powerful and resonant, attempt to answer that question. Candid and vulnerable, Miller sits with us while we puzzle: we all wish we knew what to tell our children about death. But he also pushes past this and other uncertainties, vowingand inviting usto expand our relationship / with Death, and with every challenging, uncomfortable subject we meet. In the face of questions that seem impossible to answer, We the Jury offers not a shrug, but curiosity, transparency, a throwing of the arms wide.